Policy instruments: definitions and approaches

Choosing which policy instruments to use to address public problems is an important topic in public policy studies. In a time when policymakers are increasingly asked to put forth innovative solutions to complex policy issues such as climate change and poverty or homelessness, for example, it is urgent to better understand the instruments of governance and how they can best be deployed. This approach now focuses both on traditional ‘substantive’ tools of policy-making such as regulation and public ownership, and on ‘procedural’ tools tied to the design and implementation of public participation and other activities only indirectly linked to both goods and service delivery—such as the design of advisory committees to regulatory agencies—and to policy processes more generally—such as the design of public hearings, websites, judicial review processes and others as well as upon how they are mixed together in policy bundles or portfolios. This chapter looks at both kinds of tools and how they can be combined, and draws lessons for practitioners from the work of scholars on these subjects over the past several decades.